Shot in and around Yakutsk, in a remote region of Siberia, Svetlana Romanova and Chelsea Tuggle’s Тарыҥ (Season of Dying Water) (2022) wrestles with the complex realities of a people and place facing continual, rapid transformation under Russia’s drive for resource extraction. Some 65 years earlier, Chris Marker’s essayistic short film Letter from Siberia (1957) examines the same region during a different era of Soviet colonial expansion. As a pair, these films speak to each other, with Romanova and Tuggle’s film operating as a kind of letter back to Marker.
This screening will be accompanied by an essay by asinnajaq, commissioned for the Walker Reader. She originally curated these films as part of the series let’s all be lichen, presented at Flaherty NYC in 2022.
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Bios
asinnajaq is from Inukjuak, Nunavik, and lives in Tiohtià:ke (Montréal). Her work includes filmmaking, writing, and curating. She co-created Tilliraniit, a three-day festival celebrating Inuit art and artists. asinnajaq’s work has been exhibited at art galleries and film festivals around the world. She wrote and directed Three Thousand (2017), a short sci-fi documentary. She co-curated Isuma’s presence in the Canadian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale and also co-curated the inaugural exhibition INUA at the Qaumajuq, the Inuit art center in Winnipeg. In 2020 asinnajaq received a Sobey Art Award.
Chris Marker (1921–2012) was a writer, photographer, filmmaker, and multimedia artist, considered to be among the most influential French filmmakers of the postwar era. A cinematic essayist and audiovisual poet, Marker rejected conventional narrative techniques, instead staking out a deeply political terrain defined by the use of still images, atmospheric soundtracks, and literate commentary. His best-known films include Lettre de Sibérie (Letter from Siberia) (1957), La Jetée (1962), Le Joli Mai (1963), Sans Soliel (1983), and Level Five (1997). In 1996 Marker’s video installation Silent Movie was included in the Walker exhibition Chris Marker and William Klein: Silent Movie/Moving Pictures, a collaboration with the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio. Marker’s La Jetée is part of the Walker’s Ruben/Bentson Moving Image Collection.
Svetlana Romanova (Sakha/Evenk) was born in Yakutsk, Russia, and studied visual arts in Los Angeles. She received her BFA at Otis College of Art and Design, and an MFA at California Institute of the Arts. From 2009 to 2014, she studied, lived, and worked in arts education in California. After returning to Siberia in 2015, Romanova started working on several film projects about her hometown and the regions around it. Her video practice is an investigation of two local Indigenous groups to which she belongs: Sakha and Evenk. In 2022 she curated the online project Self-Directed Visual Culture of the World’s Indigenous Women, as a part of Terrestrial Voices for the AyarKut Foundation for the Support of Contemporary Art in Yakutia (Republic of Sakha), Russia.
Chelsea Tuggle is a filmmaker and artist living in Los Angeles. Tuggle’s work was recently in the 2022 group exhibition Save Up Laughter for Winter, which was dedicated to the contemporary art of Yakutia (Republic of Sakha), at the Moscow Museum of Modern Art.
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